Philosophy of the Morning

Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration

TRACY B. STRONG
ABSTRACT: Nietzsches life project remains constant throughout his life: it is the
project of transformation or transfiguration. He formulates this as the necessity
of dealing with the way that ones past (be it that of an individual, or a society, or
the species) shapes ones present. The paradigm for this transformation is first to
be found in The Birth of Tragedy, but it reappears in various guises in all of his
work. I argue that Nietzsches writing is itself designed so as to make possible
such a transformation in his readers.

Born of the mysteries of dawn, they ponder on how, between the tenth and
the twelfth stroke of the clock, the day could present a face so pure, so radiant,
so joyfully transfiguredthey seek the philosophy of the morning.
HH 638

n January 3, 1889, Nietzsche writes to Meta von Salis that [t]he world
is transfigured, for God is on the earth (KSB 8). The next day, he writes
to Peter Gast: Sing me a new song, the world is transfigured and all the skies
rejoice (KSB 8: letter to Kselitz, 4 January 1889). He signs both letters as The
Crucified. Of the thirteen letters he writes on January 4, six are signed similarly;
all the others are signed Dionysus (see KSB 8: letters, 4 January 1889).
The letter to Gast draws from Psalm 98 where we are enjoined to sing a new
song to the Lord. The wonder that God does in the biblical text is now God
on the earth, hence the transfiguration of the world and the end of time as we
have known it. Nietzsche has taken the place of the Lord, and it is to him that
the song recognizing the transfiguration of the world is addressed.
There is no question but that during 188788 Nietzsche was planning a
Hauptwerk to be variously entitled Revaluation of All Values or The Will to
Power, often with some subtitle, a work that he expected would change the
human understanding of the world.1 This was to be philosophy for bermorgen
one hears in the preposition that it is for the bermensch. There is also no question
but that he identified the strange ecstasy that came over him in the latter part of
JOURNAL OF NIETZSCHE STUDIES, Issue 39, 2010.
Copyright 2010 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

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that year as access to something that transformed being in the world as he had
known it. One should, however, resist the temptation to identify the concern
with transfigurationwhatever that might meansimply with whatever was
happening to Nietzsche in the last, say, six months of his sanity. The term
or its cognates appear throughout his work, somewhat more frequently from
1868 until about 1880 and then again with increasing frequency after 1885. In
fact, Verklrung and its derivatives appear at least 130 times in the Kritische
Studienausgabe, with at least thirteen of those in The Birth of Tragedy.2
As much of what I have to say here is going to focus on the early usages, I need
to make a couple of preliminary points. Nietzsche speaks of Verklrung, of
Verwandlung (at least seventy appearances), and of Transfiguration (eleven);
sometimes two or even three of these terms will occur in the same entry.3 I have
some anxiety about using them pretty much as synonyms, but for the purposes
of this essay that is what I shall do. I should note, although I will not argue for
it here, that Nietzsches early work is basically of a piece with that of his later
life. I think that the standard three-part division is both wrong and apt to lead to
serious errors in reading. Heidegger, in fact, suggests that Nietzsches doctrine of
eternal return is presaged in very early (1862) essays such as Fate and History
and Free Will and Fate.4 Indeed, the concern with transfiguration is continuous throughout his work. One has only to recall that the fourth section of BT
contains an analysis of Raphaels last painting, Transfiguration, which depicts
the transfiguration of Christ in its top half and the boy possessed by a demon
in its bottom half (thereby in reverse ekphrasis reproducing in a painting the
sequence in the text of Matthew 17).5 The Raphael painting reappears in section 8
of Dawn, where Nietzsche suggests that if Raphael were to see the world as we
now see it he would behold a new transfiguration (D 8). In other words, while
Raphael presents the transfiguration of Christ, it is not the transfiguration that
might be ours. The painting is, one might say, of a Christian understanding of
transfiguration. But in the letters I cited, the transfiguration is of the earth.
Why this concern with Raphaels painting? In BT, the geometrically laid-out
transfigured Christ is taken to be representative of the apollonian, of individuation.6 The figures on the bottom part of the painting are said by Nietzsche to be
a representation of the dionysian; they exist not in a form-defined universe but
in a kind of counterclockwise whirlwindthe order of that part of the painting as defined by the various outstretched arms is that of a whirlwind. Taken
togetherread from top to bottomthe painting transcribes visually the written text of Scripture as the two episodes follow directly one on the other in the
Gospels (and would thus have appeared one above the other on the page). The
Gospel makes it clear that Peter, James, and John saw the transfigured Christ
alongside Moses and Elias. Raphael, however, has chosen the moment when
they have fallen on their faces and do not look at Himand that is the moment
of concern to Nietzsche. The bottom half is thus linked to the top not by anyone

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looking at Christs transfiguration but only by the outstretched arms of the two
figures on center left and the nonseeing eyes of the possessed boy.
I mention all this because Nietzsche refers to the whole painting as
Transfigurationauf Deutsch. Given that he has begun the book by a discussion of the marriage or unity of the two deities, it seems reasonable to understand
Transfiguration as Raphael presents it to us as necessarily containing both the
apollonian and the dionysian, both elements in the painting. I suggest here that
the two halves of the painting are meant to be inscribed in each otheras indeed
they will be when Christ a bit later on cures the demon-possessed childbut
are not yet joined. Intuitively, writes Nietzsche, we comprehend their necessary mutual interdependence (BT 2). What this leads us to is the notion that
transfiguration is related to his conception of tragedy.
In section 8 of BT, Nietzsche describes the phenomenon of tragic drama as
follows: At the bottom the aesthetic phenomenon is simple: one needs only
to have the ability to continually behold a living play and to live constantly
surrounded by a host of spirits and one will be a poet; one has only to feel the
drive to transform oneself and to speak out of other bodies and souls and one
will be a dramatist (BT 8). This is what does not happen in the painting (is
there an early critique of Christianity and its relation to the tragic here?I am
tempted to think so). It is quite clear that Nietzsche finds that those who were
actualthat is, truespectators for tragedy experienced a transfiguration or
transformation. But they were not themselves changed in toto into another being.
They saw themselves transformed before their very eyes. Transfiguration is
ones own experience, to which, however, one is a witness. The problem with
the disciples in the painting is that they do not allow themselves to be available
to that experience. As we shall see, such is also the case of Socrates.
Originally, Nietzsche notes, Dionysus was not present and was simply
imaginedthere was only the chorus: Later the attempt was made to show
the god as real. The chorus was assigned the task of exciting the mood of the
listeners to such a dionysian degree that, when the tragic hero appears on stage
they did not see the awkwardly masked figure but rather a visionary figure.
He attributes this to the transfiguring frame (BT 8). Transfiguration is accomplished by taking an experience in a particular way: what the Greek (and by
extension the true spectator for Nietzsche) saw was and was not the God. As he
notes in Human, All Too Human, The oldest image of the god is supposed to
harbor and at the same time conceal the godto intimate his presence but not
expose it to view. No Greek ever truly beheld his Apollo as a wooden obelisk,
his Eros as a lump of stone; they were symbols whose purpose was precisely
to excite fear of beholding him (AOM 222). As Babich (to whom I owe the
reminder of this quote) notes: This is precisely the secret to the success of
Alcibiades as Athena and . . . the point underscored by Paul Veyne in Did the
Greeks Believe in Their Gods?7

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In BT 22, Nietzsche is discussing the true spectator of tragedythe person

who is actually able to experience the ecstatic doubling that was necessary
for true spectatorship. Reflecting on his experience, this spectator will realize
that as the myth passed in front of him, he felt himself exalted to a kind of
omniscience . . . ; and he felt he could dip into the most delicate secrets of
unconscious emotions. Nietzsche continues on, [W]hile he thus becomes
conscious of the highest exaltation of his instincts for clarity and transfiguration, he nonetheless undergoes a curious internal bifurcation: He beholds
the transfigured world of the stage and nevertheless denies it. He sees the tragic
hero before him in epic clearness and beauty, and nevertheless rejoices in his
annihilation (BT 22).
If Nietzsche associates transfigurationor the experience of beholding
transfigurationwith tragedy, then three things are significant. First, in the
Raphael painting it is important that the two halves are and remain separate.
There is no integrating glance. Something is missing for this to be a tragedy, even
though the elements of it are present. Second, transfiguration is associatedor
can be associatedwith musicas one would expect give the association with
tragedy. While this was already present in the Birth, it reappears throughout the
notes. Hence: Music as the echo of the conditions [of life] whose graspable
expression is the mysticfeeling of transfiguration of the individual, transfiguration. Or the reconciliation of inner contradictions to something new, birth of
the third (KGW VII/2:25[241], p. 71). Music is missing in Raphaels painting.
Last, transfiguration is an ecstatic doubling: one is literally beside oneself.
My point here is that the experience of tragedy is paradigmatic of the experience of transfiguration. Always remembering that being a spectator means
for Nietzsche having a certain kind of receptivity, what Heidegger might call
openness, we find that this is what occurs during a tragedy:8
A public of spectators as we know it was unknown to the Greeks: in their theaters
the terraced structure of the concentric arcs of the spectator-place made it possible for everyone actually to overlook [bersehen] the whole world of culture
around him and to imagine, in absorbed concentration, that he himself was a
chorist. . . . The dionysian excitement is capable of communicating this artistic
gift to a multitude, that of seeing themselves surrounded by such a host of spirits,
knowing that one is inwardly one with them. This process of the tragic chorus is
the dramatic protophenomenon: to see oneself [as on stage] transformed before
oneself [as seated as audience] and now to behave as if one had actually entered
into another body, into another character. This process stands at the beginning
of the development of the drama. (BT 8)

My apologies for the awkwardness of the spectator-placeKaufmann simply

leaves it out. I have in my writing on Nietzsche several times returned to this
passage, as it is, in my reading, the key to BT. It indicates that as a spectator
one overlooked the real worldthat is, that one was not controlled by it and
that one took it inand that one acquired a kind of ecstatic doubleness in that

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one saw oneself on stage. What one saw on stage was a transformation (here
Verwandlung) of oneself. Nor is this experience limited to the performance of
tragedy: it is reproduced in the architecture of important Greek sites.9
But the process of transfiguration or transformation is not yet complete:
being able to be an audience member is only the beginning. When the above
transformation has taken placethat is, when the spectator in his or her seat
sees him- or herself on stage as a chorus member, thus originally as a satyrwe
get this: In this enchanted state, the dionysian reveler sees himself as a satyr,
and as a satyr, in turn he sees the god, which means that in his transformation he beholds another vision outside himself, as the apollonian perfection to
his own state. With this new vision, the drama is complete (BT 8). Central
here is the concern with what it means for drama to be available to oneself. It
involves a kind of receptivity and a suspension not only of the ethical but of
the critical. Being an audience member requires a particular mode, or attunement, Stimmung. This is the gist of Nietzsches accusation against Socrates:
his desire for rational explanation made it impossible for him to be a member
of an audience. (If you keep asking yourself why Othello just doesnt go have
a talk with Desdemona about that handkerchief, you will never allow yourself
experience of the play.) Thus Socrates, in what Nietzsche sees as his insistence
on determining the meaning of a word (what is justice, piety, etc.?), makes
tragedy impossible and opens the door to what he will identify as the tyrannical impulse.10
The death of tragedy is then also, or perhaps the same as, the death of the
audience for tragedy. To be an audience in Nietzsches sense means to be open
to, to allow the tragedy to be available to oneself.11 Modern audiences are,
as it were, aggressivethey seek to interpret, to make sense of. The book
is thus also a challenge to its reader: Can you be a true audience member? As
Nietzsche writes:
Whoever wishes to test rigorously to what extent he himself is related to the
true aesthetic listener or belongs to the community of the Socratic-critical
persons needs only to examine sincerely the feeling with which he accepts
miracles represented on the stage: whether he feels his historical sense, which
insists on strict psychological causality, insulted by them, whether he makes a
benevolent concession and admits the miracle as a phenomenon intelligible to
childhood but alien to him, or whether he experiences anything else. For in this
way he will be able to determine to what extent he is capable of understanding
myth as a concentrated image of the world that, as a condensation of phenomena, cannot dispense with miracles. It is probable, however, that almost
everyone, upon close examination, finds that the critical-historical spirit of
our culture has so affected him that he can only make the former existence
of myth credible to himself by means of scholarship, through intermediary
abstractions. But without myth every culture loses the healthy natural power
of its creativity: only a horizon defined by myths completes and unifies a
whole cultural movement. (BT 23)

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Note: Nietzsche describes here a test by which to determine if one is capable

of being a (true) audience member. I cannot in this space explore more fully
Nietzsches notion of audience,12 but it is important to note that Nietzsche wrote
BT in the particular style in which he did with the intention that it also be for
the present age the test of ones capacity to be an audience that he thought
necessary.13 What the plays made possible as political education was not a benign
pluralism but an agonism that sought only a word and never a final word. This
does not mean that Antigone and Kreon should work out their differences over
a couple of glasses of retsina. It means that one took responsibility for what one
did and said without, however, requiring that the other acquiesce and that this
means that neither of them may justify what they do on the grounds of being the
final wordfor each that will lead to an embrace of death.
Thus, to experience the tragic requires certain qualities of character that not
all have, qualities that can also be lost. What Nietzsche does clearly indicate
here is that there exists the very real possibility that a world could exist in which
some, perhaps most, are incapable of grasping tragedy and of responding to it
in the manner set out above.
The important recognition here is that the book, whose full title is The Birth
of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, has as its first focus not, in the end, Wagner
or the rebirth of German culture (although those are not foreign to it) but an
Auseinandersetzung with Aristotle as to the significance of tragedy. Aristotle,
after all and as Nietzsche points out, had written the Poetics well after the zenith
of Athenian tragedy, during a period in which the art was in decline, as was the
polis that was its principle subject of concern. In The Gay Science, he notes
that Aristotle certainly did not hit the nail on the head when he discussed the
ultimate end of Greek tragedy (GS 80).
For Aristotle the end of tragedy was katharsis, an understanding of purification that he understood in terms borrowed from medicine, where Hippocrates
had used it to refer to the clearing off of morbid humors and which Aristotle
had employed in the general sense of purification.14 In point of fact, BT is an
argument against Aristotle and his claim that tragedy produces self-recognition
(anagnorisis) and in favor of the claim that it produces Verwandlung (transformation) or Verklrung (transfiguration). Indeed, Wilamowitz in Zukunftsphilologie,
his vitriolic response to BT, had in a footnote already noticed this implicit but
ubiquitous opposition to Aristotle. (Wilamowitz puts it in a footnote probably
because it was to him so obviously wrong and so silly that it was not worth
carrying on about.)15
For Nietzsche, the self is not found at home, so to speak, but achieved; the
picture is not of turning around but of a path, a kind of growth such as that
accomplished in the Oedipus at Colonnus. Successful tragedy for Nietzsche
constitutes the sealing of a change not so much in what one is but in the
naturalness by which one is able to deal in ones life and history with the
historically evolving conditions that affect a culture.16 What the audience

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learns in Nietzsches anti-Aristotelian understanding is not that Oedipus suffers from hamartiaa fatal error from the consequences of which he needs to
be cleansedand that we should be careful of hubris but, rather, that there is
no crime, that Oedipus did everything that could be humanly expected of him
and that it was still pointless.17
The paradox (for us at least) is that Nietzsche sees this process as joyful.
In BT he writes: The cry of horror or the longing moan over an irretrievable loss are intoned from the highest joy (BT 2). Nietzsches analysis here
(see BT 16) reflects his nuanced understanding of Schopenhauer: music permits
the annihilation of the individual and thus a release from the pain of individuation. Tragedyas music-dramaarrived at the same thing, which is why the
wisdom of tragedy is that in terms of suffering it is best not to have been born
(see Oedipus at Colonnus). What is central to his understanding of tragedy is
that this realization of the world presents itself as a source of passion and joy,
not of despair.
Where can tragic transfiguration be found? It is important here to recollect
that Greek drama was not entertainment. Nor was it about encountering a new
story or plot. Everyone knew the story. Dionysos was a god, and the festivals are
dedicated to him, as a god. Late in his career Nietzsche returns to these themes
(though I would argue that they have been present throughout). After an entry
in an 1888 notebook in which he repeats the critique of Aristotle, he notes:
Drama
Drama is not, as the half-educated believe, the plot, but rather a matter of
understanding the Doric, indeed, of the Doric-hieratic origin of the word
drama: the encounter, the occurrence, the sacred history, founding legend,
the recollection, the making present of the task of the hieratic. (KGW VIII/
3:14[34], p. 27)

It is important to note here that he immediately follows this with an entry entitled
Apollonisch-dionysisch (no upper case on the second word) in which he says
the following:18 There are two conditions in which the artistic itself rises in
humans like a natural force, controlling him whether he will or not: on the one
hand as a compulsion to vision, on the other as a compulsion to the orgiastic. In
normal life, both conditions are weaker: in dream and in intoxication [several
illegible words follow]. However the same opposition arises between dream
and intoxication: both release artistic powers in us, each however in a different
manner: vision is that of combining, of composing; intoxication that of gesture,
passion, song, dance (KGW VIII/3:14[36], p. 28). There are two apparently
divergent matters at work here. On the one hand, when speaking of tragedy
Nietzsche is at pains to emphasize its hieratic, sacerdotal quality. On the other
hand, he is also concerned to suggest that the same drives are presentif usually
in a weaker formin everyday life. Not everyone, however, is open to these
drives. Thus in HH, we find:

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Living and experiencingWhen we observe how some people know how to
manage their experiencestheir insignificant, everyday experiencesso that
they become an arable soil that bears fruit three times a year, while othersand
how many there are!are driven through surging waves of destiny, the most
multifarious currents of the times and the nations, and yet always remain on top,
bobbing like a cork: then we are at the end tempted to divide mankind into a
minority (a minimality) of those who know how to make much of little, and a
majority of those who know how to make little of much; indeed, one does encounter those inverted sorcerers who, instead of creating the world out of nothing,
create nothingness [das Nichts] out of the world. (HH 627)19

The point here is that while transfigurationas in tragedyis of the highest

kind of experience, it is also something that is available in everyday life, in the
ordering, the insignificant. As Emerson remarked in The American Scholar,
in a passage that Nietzsche knew: I ask not for the great, the remote, the
romantic. . . . I embrace the common. I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar,
the low, and you may have the antique and future worlds. . . . What would we
really know the meaning of ?20
I have tried to establish that for transfiguration to take place an interaction of
the self with the self modeled on that which Nietzsche analyzes as that of tragedy has to be the case. I have furthermore argued that this interaction can easily
be refused or avoidedsuch, Nietzsche says, is the consequence of Socratism.
I have then noted that while we tend to think of transfiguration on the model of
Christ on Mount Tabor, it is clear that Nietzsche thinks that it can characterize
what one might call the ordinary or everyday.
Two related questions now confront us: What does transfiguration look like?
What is its relation to philosophy?
At the beginning of the 1886 preface to the first volume of HH, Nietzsche
writes that all of his writings contain snares and nets for unwary birds and in
effect a persistent unnoticed invitation to the reversal of habitual evaluations
and valued habits (HH P:1). The German for reversal is Umkehrung, which
carries the sense of turn round or, we might say, periagoge, the necessary
preparatory move to a philosophical life in the Republic.
How does this operate? It occurs on a number of what we might think of
as levels. A first level comes from the experience of reading Nietzsche. One
canshouldfind oneself caught up in a development such that the way one
assessed the world changes.
As an example of such a reversal let us take section 5 of Morality as Antinature of Twilight of the Idols.21 Nietzsche begins: Given that one has grasped
the sacrilege of such a revolt against life, like the revolt that has become nearly
sacrosanct in Christian morality, one thus has, fortunately, grasped something
else as well: the uselessness, illusiveness, absurdity, and mendacity of such
a revolt (TI Morality 5). The operant subjectivity of the paragraph is not
defined: it is one. This realization is available in principle to anyone, at least

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anyone in our historical position. The sentence is a kind of invitation: Are you
part of this one? Might you see yourself that way? The whole entry is premised
on a conditional, that already requires inverting ones normal understanding of
the idea of sacrilege.
The previous numbered paragraph ends with the statement that [l]ife ends
where the kingdom of God begins (TI Morality 5). This is the source of
the sacrilege. The sacrilege was identified in the previous entry as the claim
that God can in fact look into ones heart. We know that God can look into
ones heart (the traditional musical tonic chord, one might say). To claim this,
however, must appear as sacrilege, that is, as a profanation of God. The text
appears first to offer a stance supportive of life, but it does so in precisely terms
(sacrilege) that it takes over from that which it claims to criticize. The first
move in this paragraph requires, in other words, the use of religious language
and categories in an irreligious manner. One might think that this constitutes a
condemnation of religion by Nietzsche. However, the initial resolution appears
now not to resolve the matter but to call up something else. Nietzsche continues:
A condemnation of life by one who is alive remains, in the end, just a symptom
of a particular kind of life: this does not at all raise the question of whether the
condemnation is justified or unjustified. Any condemnation of life as such is a
manifestation of something profoundly wrong. A condemnation of life requires
that one tacitly assume a position outside life, in other words, that is false to
oneself, one that lies. So attacking God is to still remain inside a framework
that lies. It is to assume the stance of God in the name of denying Godhardly
an advance. Again, grasping this is apparently available to anyoneas shown
by the persistent use of manonein the first part of the entry. Nietzsche
continues: One would have to occupy a position outside life, and on the other
hand to know it as well as one, as many, as all who have lived it, in order to
be allowed even to touch upon the problem of the value of life. To even raise
the question of the value of life means to have placed oneself in the position
of being abstractly outside life. It means to adopt a stance promiscuouslyit
matters not if monarchical, aristocratic, or democraticand in that also claim
exemption from the judgment being made of and on the world. To understand
in this way, however, would be to change who is the subject.
Nietzsche again writes, following the colon that ended the previous excerpt:
[T]hese are reasons enough to grasp that, for us, this problem is an inaccessible problem. When we speak of values, we speak under the inspiration, under
the optics of life: life itself is forcing us to posit values, life itself is valuing by
means of us, if [and/or when: wenn] we posit values . . . (TI Morality 5).
Note how the insistent one yields here to a we. A seductive new resolution
is proposed: that of life. Those who understand (we) that life is the answer
will realize that there is nothing to do but to succumb to the realization that
there is nothing to say, that the problem is inaccessible. (In How the True

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World Finally Became a Fiction, the capsule history of Western philosophy

Nietzsche has just given in the previous section, he associated this position with
positivism.) Again the reader is tempted to feel a part of the apparent fraternity
of insight. With this move the subject-reader (if he or she has joined this we)
finds itself particular, nonuniversal, implicitly an elite. It makes a difference
who is askingthe passage leads the reader to accept this by implicitly offering
the reader a resting space with the new we: It follows from this that even
that anti-natural morality that takes God to be the antithesis and condemnation
of life is only one of lifes value judgments. a judgment made by which life?
Which kind of life? This is what morality as it has been understood up to
now isa condemnation by the condemned, as Nietzsche will say shortly,
and this includes even the judgment that God is the antithesis to life. When the
reader started this sectionMorality as Anti-naturethere seemed to be an
expectation that morality would be opposed to nature. Now it appears, as
Nietzsche will go on to say in the next numbered paragraph, that the problem
comes when morality condemns on its own grounds, that is, when morality
moralizes itself. Notice that an example of moralitys self-moralization is the
judgment that God is the antithesis to life. The question (. . . which life? Which
kind of life?) is raised therefore of the kind of life that makes such a judgment,
that requires such a judgment. Who is it that says there is nothing to be said about
life? This question itself succumbs to a temptation to think that consonance
has been achieved. Thus Nietzsche will immediately undermine the apparent
finality of this we by subtracting himself from itbut then who and what
are left of the we? We had associated ourselves with what we thought to be
Nietzsches position, but now he tells us that this was wrong: But I already
gave the answer: declining, weakened, tired, and condemned life The sudden
intrusion from the I announces that there is no help from Nietzsche here: what
he has to say he has already said; the reader did not grasp it but thought that
he or she did. The answer is what it has always been and has been here since
before we started the paragraph. In effect we have to start over: we are back at
the beginning, knowing it, however, perhaps for a first time.22 In wanting to
agree with what I had thought Nietzsche to be saying I have shown myself to
be declining, weak, tired: I have condemned my life.
I have tried to show by the above analysis that Nietzsches writing thus calls up
(or can call up) a critical relation between what the reader wants and what the text
makes available and requires of the reader. It divides us. The effect is to call into
question precisely the desire to give resolution and to bring consonance to experience. This is what Nietzsche in his preface to TI calls sounding out idols, idols
that function here as eternal truths, that is, as truths that claim for themselves
a permanent moral standing. To sound out an idol means rather to produce a
dissonance, the contrast between the tuning fork and the sound the idol makes
when struck. This is why Nietzsche says that the human being is a dissonance.

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Nietzsche says that one writes words in blood, and Emerson had written
of Montaignes prose that if one cut these words . . . they would bleed.23
To have read the text like this, to have made the words ones own flesh, means
that the experience of reading can produce a transfiguration or transformation
of the meaning you make when you use these words or these sentences. And a
transformation of the meaning you make is a transformation of you. The later
Wittgenstein writes like this;24 Rousseau writes like this;25 J. L. Austin, for all
the smell of sherry, often writes like this.26
I tend to think that all that Nietzsche published can and should be read in this
manner.27 I think it was precisely his intention to produce by his writing such a
transformation in the self (such is, after all, the oldest purpose of philosophy).
His text thus serves to bring into existence an exemplar particular to each reader.
Exemplar is the term that Nietzsche uses to refer to what Schopenhauer was
to himthat which he was not but which he felt the urge to become. (Werde
wer du bist!) I have considered the case of the exemplar at length elsewhere,
as have some other writers, and will not go into it here.
In the preface to the second edition of GS, Nietzsche relates this to the philosopher: A philosopher who has made a way through many kinds of health,
and keeps traversing them, has passed through an equal number of philosophies;
he simply cannot keep from transposing every time his condition into the most
spiritual form and distance: this art of transfiguration is philosophy (GS P:4;
my italics). This is also, and I will leave it at this, the very definition of what philosophy does. Like Rilkes torso of the archaic Apollo, the text looks at you, and
if you allow it to see you, you will hear that du musst dein Leben ndern.

Epilogue
But what about the big Nietzsche? You have turned him into a musty Senior
Common Room amalgamation of Austin and Emerson.
I had rather hoped to have turned Austin and Emerson into Nietzsche, to
have shown how radical they are. Big is with us all the time, we just dont allow
ourselves to be seen by it. But, all right, let us look at eternal returnwe dont
capitalize nouns in English.

One can say, I think, the following. First, whatever Nietzsche means by eternal
return, he does not primarily mean a simple theory of heavenly movement,
the factual recurrence of the events of ones life, exactly ordered the same
as they have already and will come to pass.28 Eternal return is almost always
associated with transformation in human beings. The shepherd who bites the
head off the snake in On the Vision and the Riddle is transfigured and
laughs like no man has ever laughed before. Once Zarathustra goes through his
convalescencethat is, attains healthafter this passage he is said to be awake

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and . . . stay awake eternally. Nietzsche warns that one must guard against
[thinking of eternal return on the example of ] the false analogy of the stars, or
the ebb and flow, day and night, seasons . . . (KGW V/2:11[157], p. 400), and
tells us that when you incarnate the thought of thoughts it will transform you
(KGW V/2:11[143], p. 394). None of this lends credence to the notion of some
great mechanical cycle.29
Second, when the thought of thoughts comes it seems unlikely that eternal
return will be the return of everything always the same if we mean by that
that there is no change. There is no way such an understanding of eternal return
could be said to transform someone; one could only experience what happens
to oneself as if it were happening. (If I have the consciousness of it having
happened before, then I am having a new experience: the old one plus the new
consciousness.) Nietzsche speaks of eternal return as the pivot point of history
and sees himself, notoriously, as breaking history in two (KGW VII/1:16[149],
p. 540). In any case, eternal does not mean infinite in time and duration but
always present. As Wittgenstein remarks in the Tractatus, If we take eternity
to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs
to those who live in the present.30
If the chapter of Thus Spoke Zarathustra On Redemption establishes that
humans cannot escape time and yet that time is for them a problem as it binds
them to a form of life that is nihilistic, hence that their will is that of the weak,
hence that their will triumphs over those who are strong, then true change will
require finding some way of being-in-time such that the past no longer poses a
problem for the present.31 What would be a form of life in which the past was
never a problemthat is, it did not compel cyclical compulsive repetition (the
neuroses Freud was to call the discontents or malaise of civilization)and in
which humans, as opposed to animals, were nevertheless self-conscious? And
such a thought must be incarnatewords in bloodmust be constitutive of
ones self.32 It must, he writes, sink in slowly over many generations so that
they will be fruitful and build on it (Two thousand years for Christianitymany
thousand for this). . . .33
The above establishes, I hope, that eternal return is thought by Nietzsche to be a
solution to the compulsions of the willincluding and especially the will to power,
which is the only true idea of the will for Nietzscheand thus to the weight of
a misbegotten past on the present. Eternal return is intended to transform human
relations to a past that has become compulsive and nihilistic and thus to make
another future a possible present. It is, we might say, a praxis, that is, a means to
transform the structure of agencycall this character. When in the last sentence
of the On the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche notes that humans would rather
will the void than be void of will (GM III:28), he is indicating that the hold that
the present past has on humans is such that they will continue to work within its
structure, even when it no longer is sensuously alive.

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63

Eternal return, then, occurs when an action embodies itself, that is, makes
itself flesh in and by its performance. When you incarnate the thought of
thoughts, it will change you, as cited above. Eternal return, however, is a mode
of transformation or transfiguration, not the substance of it. In this sense, eternal return is in no way the imposition of a particular substantive standard: just
as werde wer du bist is for each person different, being for each person the
touchstone of excellence. Thus we find the following, set as a task: My
teaching says the task is to live such that you must wish to so live again. You
will in any case! . . . To whom striving gives the highest feeling, let him strive;
to whom peace gives the highest feeling, let him be peaceful; to whom ordering, following, obedience give the highest feeling, let him obey. May he only
become conscious about that which gives him the highest feeling, and not balk
at any means. It is a matter of eternity (KGW V/2:11[163], p. 402). Those who
live in eternity, that is, in the present, can have no weakness of will, are not,
cannot be, slavishly moral.
Nietzsches setting out of his teaching gives rise to a particular type of pluralism. Humans are not to be judged on the basis of what they are, with some
being superior to others because they are more intelligent, or strong, or whatever.
Rather, they are to be judged in relation to Nietzsches touchstone imperative
and encomium: Become who you are!34 To become who one is means first to
have come to know that which stands over one and to which one responds but
is not yet; it then means to respond to that imperative, an imperative that will
feel categorical to you even if it be not universally such.
I claim, then, that the question of eternal return is Nietzsches approach to
dealing with the hold that the past has on the presentthe problem for all
revolution or transfiguration. It allows the relation between that which we are
(i.e., have been) and that in which we can come to see ourselves. One has to be
careful here: Polonius (To thine own self be true, just before he is killed like
a rat) and the American Marines (Be all that you can be!) show us that there
are debased or facile versions of this. But it is clear that Nietzsche saw extensive
possibilities for this: The coming history: this thought will always conquer
moreand those who do not believe in it must eventually, due to their nature,
die out. Only he who holds his existence [Dasein] capable of eternal repetition
will remain: amongst such beings however conditions such as no utopians have
ever attained are possible (KGW V/2:11[338], p. 471; my italics).
Such is the philosopher of Morgen and bermorgen: of the morning, of
the morrow, and of the day after tomorrow. The task of philosophy is nothing more, or less, than the transfiguration of the commonplace, of every day
(BGE 212).
University of California, San Diego
tstrong@weber.ucsd.edu

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ACKNOWLEDGMENT
I am conscious in this essay of an unfootnotable debt to the thought of Stanley
Cavell.

NOTES
1. These are conveniently collected in volume 2 of Alfred Bumlers edition of Nietzsches
writings and notebooks, Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Unschuld des Werdens (Stuttgart: Kroner Verlag,
1956). On the so-called book The Will to Power, see Babette Babich, Le sort du Nachlass: Le
problme de loeuvre posthume, in Le mlivre, ed. Pascale Hummel (forthcoming); and Bernd
Magnus, Nietzsches Philosophy in 1888: The Will to Power and the bermensch, Journal of
the History of Philosophy 24, no. 1 (1986): 78100.
2. It is a sign of the interpretive orientation of Walter Kaufmann that transfiguration does
not appear in his index to BT. All translations are mine.
3. E.g., TI Maxims 10. The Greek for transfigured is metamorphoo, from which we get
metamorphosis.
4. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 2 (Pf llingen, Germany: Neske Verlag, 1961), 135.
The essays have not appeared in the KGW but can be found in the Werke und Briefe, vol. 2:
Jugendschriften (Munich: Beck Verlag, 1934), 54ff. They also appear in French in Friedrich
Nietzsche, Ecrits autobiographiques, 18561869 (Paris: PUF, 1994), 18799.
5. See the analysis in Gary Shapiro, Archeologies of Vision (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2003); and the commentary on Shapiros reading of the painting in Babette
Babich, Shapiros Archeology of Transfiguration, New Nietzsche Studies 5, nos. 34, and 6,
nos. 12 (20034): 18495. Go to http://www.abcgallery.com/R/raphael/raphael61.html for a
reproduction.
6. This is central to Shapiros claims (Archeologies of Vision).
7. Babich, Shapiros Archeology of Transfiguration, 182.
8. See my discussion in Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration, 3rd ed.
(Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2001), chap. 6; and in my Nietzsche and Questions of
Tragedy, Tyranny, and International Relations, in Tragedy and International Relations, ed. Toni
Erskine and Ned Lebow (forthcoming).
9. See Vincent Scully, The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods. Greek Sacred Architecture, rev.
ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979). For an example of bersehen, see the temple at
Delphi at http://www.ourworldwonders.com/images/delphi.jpg.
10. See my text Tyranny and Tragedy in Nietzsche: From Ancient to Modern, in Confronting
Tyranny: Ancient Lessons for Global Politics, ed. David Tabachnick and Toivo Koivukoski
(Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), 10322.
11. In this vein Martin Heidegger remarks, The art work opens up in its own way the Being
of beings. This opening up, i.e., this deconcealing, i.e., the truth of beings, happens in the work.
Art is truth setting itself to work (The Origin of the Work of Art, in Poetry, Language, Thought
[New York: Harper and Row, 1971], 39).
12. See my Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration, chap. 6.
13. See my Philosophy and the Project of Cultural Revolution, Philosophical Topics 33,
no. 2 (2008), 1123.
14. See, e.g., Hippocrates, Aphorisms, 5.36.
15. U. v. Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, Future Philology! trans. and ed. Babette Babich, New
Nietzsche Studies 4 (2000): 32n52.
16. See, e.g., PTAG 1.

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17. There is much debate as to whether or not hamartia refers to intellectual or moral
qualities, most of which seems to me beside the point. See T. C. W. Stinton, Hamartia in
Aristotle and Greek Tragedy, Classical Quarterly, n.s., 25, no. 2 (1975): 22154. Hamartia is
not a simple mistake, as Aristotle indicates that it is deeply embedded in the protagonist and the
mistaken action is an inevitable consequence of the protagonists character. Nietzsche refers to
hamartia twice but only in the context of Christian sin, for which it is in fact the word in the New
Testament (KGW V/2:4[164], p. 472 and V/1:4[219], p. 484). See Thomas Gould, The Innocence
of Oedipus: The Philosophers on the Oedipus Rex, in Modern Critical Interpretations: Sophocles
Oedipus Rex, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1988), 4963.
18. So much for the standard opinion that Nietzsche abandons the Apollonian from his
middle period on.
19. The bobbing like a cork is what Pindar in Pythian Ode 2 says happens to those who do
not become what they are. See Babette Babich, Pindars Becoming: Translating the Imperatives
of Praise, in Words in Blood Like Flowers. Philosophy and Poetry, Music and Eros in Hlderlin,
Nietzsche, and Heidegger (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 7596.
20. R. W. Emerson, The American Scholar, in Essays and Lectures (New York: New American
Library, 1979), 6869.
21. This section draws on (and improves, I believe, in response to a conversation with Simon
May) the argument in my Introduction: Hammers, Idleness, and Music to Friedrich Nietzsche,
Twilight of the Idols (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997).
22. Cf. the opening lines of Peoples and Fatherlands in BGE: I hear it again for the first
timethe overture to Die Meistersinger. . . .
23. R. W. Emerson, Montaigne, or The Skeptic, in Essays and Lectures (New York: New
American Library, 1979), 700.
24. Cf. Stanley Cavell on Wittgensteins writing: Either the suggestion penetrates past
assessment and becomes part of the sensibility from which assessment proceeds, or it is
philosophically useless (Must We Mean What We Say? [New York: Scribners, 1969], 71).
25. See my Jean Jacques Rousseau and the Politics of the Ordinary (Lanham, Md.: Rowman
and Littlefield, 2001), chaps. 12.
26. Go to the following story in Austin and see if you will ever mistake an accident again:
J. L. Austin, Philosophical Papers (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962), 185. What has changed in you,
and how?
27. See my Introduction to Nietzsche (Farnham, U.K.: Ashgate, 2009), xixxxiii; as well as
other texts of mine cited there.
28. Babette E. Babich, Nietzsches Philosophy of Science (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1994), 284. Babich argues against this. Nietzsche is explicit on this.
29. As Peter Gendolla points out, Time as a circle, represented as an eternally recurring cycle,
is as old as the observation of the stars . . . (Zeit. Zur Geschichte der Zeiterfahrung [Cologne:
Dumont, 1992], 6).
30. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1963), 147, 6.4311.
31. See the discussion in my Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration, 22134.
32. Thus, when Walter Kaufmann translates eingefleischt as inveterate (as in his
translation of WP #5), he loses the physiological sense I hear: Der eingefleischte GottGod
incarnate.
33. Nietzsche, Die Unschuld des Werdens, vol. 2, 47475. A much more extensive elaboration
of several of the arguments here can be found in chapter 9 of my Friedrich Nietzsche and the
Politics of Transfiguration.
34. See again the analysis in Babich, Pindars Becoming, 7596.

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